Note: As the dh+lib Review editors work behind the scenes this summer, we have invited a few members of our community to step in as guest editors and share with us what they are reading and why the dh+lib audience might want to read it too. This post is from Kristen Mapes, Assistant Director of Digital Humanities in the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University.

As summer shifts into fall planning, I find my reading oriented toward articles that I may assign to my students alongside writings that speak to the DH values I try to put at the center of my work as a practitioner. After reading these three articles and providing a bit of a summary, I have noticed a common thread: we are still working out what DH really means in practice. What rhetoric do we use to frame our relationships to each other, or how we introduce people to our practices? What infrastructures shape what is possible and how we carry things out? And truly at the center of it all: how can we avoid being spread too thinly, whether on committees, in consultations, or across methodologies?

Morgan challenges librarians working in digital humanities to look closely at the way we teach and frame DH tools when giving workshops, presenting in classrooms, and conducting consultations. Too often, we characterize DH tools as ‘easy’ without thinking through what is ‘easy’ about them and forgetting that ‘easiness’ is a relative concept for each learner we encounter. By framing a tool as ‘easy’, we hide the challenging data modeling and methodological work that underlies the work behind the tool.

Morgan posits that librarians rely on ‘easy’ DH tools due to issues of scalability in DH infrastructure. By placing the burden of learning to the learner and relying on the ‘easiness’ of the tool and pre-existing documentation for it (often created by the tool-creators themselves), we are doing two things: making up for the lack of time and support we can give to each person or project, and shifting the risk of success or failure to the learner. This shift of responsibility leads learners to blame themselves if they have trouble with the tool. Morgan points out that this decision to shift risk and rely on ‘easy tools’ is understandable in the labor contexts in which librarians operate, and it is often necessary considering the non-scalability of humanities projects due to the humanities’ complicated relationship to data.

If we want to grow participation in DH, we need to think carefully about how we frame introductions to its methods and tools by keeping in mind the situatedness of “ease” and the future infrastructures available to support nonscalable DH projects.

In this article, Risam critiques the academic environment, in the form of the neoliberal university, by applying the theoretical frameworks of affective labor and digital carework to the field of digital humanities. Risam argues that diversity work is a form of affective labor that is disproportionately taken on—willingly or unwillingly—by women, people of color, LGBTQ individuals, and others whose labor writ large has been traditionally unseen and undervalued. Affective labor is baked into DH through expectations of ‘niceness’ and interdisciplinary collegiality. Digital carework—“a form of affective labor that relies on the deployment of affect through digital media to remediate inequalities within higher education”—is also baked into DH through expectations of community building, mentoring, and collaboration.

DH is seen as an opportunity to expand the archive and provide inclusivity by breaking canon, and yet the work of challenging the archive and challenging systems of oppression is itself disruptive and not “nice.” The promise of DH as functioning to support diversifying the archive and/or the academy is in direct odds with the rhetoric around DH as “nice” and the expectation that people performing DH work take on the affective labor of building community and being “friendly” and “supportive.” Risam returns several times to the critique that diversity initiatives in academic settings expect inclusion to be “visible but not transformational,” that diversity and inclusion are seen as boxes to check but that the academy has no real interest in shifting academic culture to live out those values. Risam centers her concern around the people undertaking this labor, asking us to consider at what point the labor of community building and visible representation venture into exploitation and where the balance between waged and unwaged labor lies in the academic context.

This article is a critique of the Selfiecity project, and while not particularly new, something I just discovered. Caplan pushes against the tendency of digital and/or statistical projects to prioritize experimentation and visualization over analysis. Referring to Borges’ warning against creating a map the size of the place it is intended to represent, Caplan shares the context of Durkheim’s introduction of statistics into sociology and the revolution (albeit flawed) in method that followed. Big data, which at once provides granular, detailed data about individuals and operates on an unprecedented scale, tempts researchers into projects that seek to create such a doomed map.

The critique of Selfiecity focuses on the scale of data explored in the project. Caplan makes a strong point about the role of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in the data processing from a labor ethics and humanistic perspective.

While Caplan discusses Selfiecity (as well as Phototrails) in particular, the caution against projects that lack methodological grounding and focus could be applied to many DH projects, large or small. This critique touches on a tension around the field of DH, as most practitioners find themselves encountering and embarking upon new methodologies which require new training and backgrounds before they can be fully engaged with.

Note: As the dh+lib Review editors work behind the scenes this summer, we have invited a few members of our community to step in as guest editors and share with us what they are reading and why the dh+lib audience might want to read it too. This post is from Tierney Gleason, Reference and Digital Humanities Librarian at Fordham University Libraries.

My reading list this summer has focused on issues of labor, web accessibility, and the use of archives in digital humanities, with an eye towards seeking out new research partnerships, improving technical skills, and developing new projects and workshops in the coming academic year.

Written by an English professor and a librarian, this article documents the partnership between Roopika Risam and Susan Edwards to create the Digital Scholars Program for undergraduates at Salem State University. Situating their work in institutional and economic context, the authors describe their challenges engaging in DH scholarship in the library at a regional comprehensive university amidst shrinking budgets, a reduction in library staff, heightened research benchmarks for tenure and promotion, and new responsibilities created by digital projects outside of traditional job descriptions. Through naming multiple points of tension that place unequal expectations of labor on librarians, Risam and Edwards explain how positioning labor issues at the center of their DH work allowed them to explore a collaboration that championed student success, highlighted the university’s special collections, connected with the local community, and provided guidance for taking direct action to cultivate equitable research partnerships between contributors. I appreciated the mention of project charters, especially A Student Collaborators’ Bill of Rights from UCLA, since that is something I often stress to graduate students, as well as the example of Risam finding a way for Edwards to receive compensation for her work on a grant-funded project. With quotes from scholars and/or scholar librarians Lisa Spiro, Miriam Posner, Micah Vandegrift, and Stewart Varner, this is a great article for librarians working at schools with smaller budgets looking to renew their inspiration for what ethical collaboration in DH can and should look like for everyone involved.

I have returned to this article as I move towards including web accessibility as a core component of my teaching on digital tools and the creation of born-digital scholarly communications. Williams challenges DH scholars to examine universal design principles in their work to reach the widest possible audiences. He recounts working on a project building an accessible website at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) in 2001 and describes how a blind person demonstrating screen-reading software led him to reevaluate his perspectives on disability. He began to see how traditional ways of accessing technology were socially constructed and conclude that “All technology is assistive, in the end.” (204) Besides exploring the importance of universal design principles, Williams recommends digital scholars begin exploring resources from the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), stresses the need for free and open source accessibility tools to work in tandem with content management systems like WordPress and Omeka, provides an example of how the tool Anthologize aids readers who are blind or experience low vision, and suggests tools to crowdsource and produce captions, subtitles, and transcripts. I look forward to researching what tools and plugins have been developed since this article was published to meet these needs since I have colleagues who are interested in producing digital editions in the coming year. As a librarian working in DH, I see incorporating web accessibility into my information management skill set as an opportunity for advocacy and inclusion within my libraries and broader communities. For those who are interested, resources on understanding How People with Disabilities Use the Web from the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) along with the Introduction to Web Accessibility from Web Accessibility In Mind (WebAIM) serve as useful companion resources to this article.

This white paper covers the work of the Documenting the Now project to create “new digital tools to facilitate the collection, analysis and preservation of tweets” with a focus on “social media content created by participants in the recent wave of African-American activism in response to police shootings” (2). The findings and recommendations in this report stem from research, data collection, software development, ethical questions, and most importantly community conversations, and come together to make this report a thought-provoking read for archivists, librarians, and researchers. The authors describe their work over a two-year period grappling with ethical issues ranging from Twitter’s Terms of Service, police surveillance of Black communities, discovering a fake account run by Russian operatives posing as a #BlackLivesMatter activist, and how professional archival practices can cause harm to Black communities. One of my biggest takeaways (and there are many!) from this paper is to increase efforts to challenge researchers to think more critically about social media data in my role as a librarian, particularly in terms of examining the data closely and encouraging complementary research to “educate oneself about a movement and its actors” (5). The other important takeaway is to encourage fellow librarians and archivists “to apply traditional archival practices such as appraisal, collection development, and donor relations to social media and web materials” (12). The internet may provide to the opportunity to scrape content from the web (3), but this content is most meaningful when collected ethically with community participation, needs, and safety as central to the archival process, and the collection is contextualized by personal engagement and additional sources to provide a fuller picture of the lives and activism of social media content creators.

I had read two of the articles in this collection in the past introducing me to the feminist research method of “reading against the grain” but chose to read the whole book cover to cover this summer. As a feminist practitioner of DH, my personal research aims to question archival records and look for new ways to circumvent archival silences. Additionally, honing these critical skills to think about different pathways for exploring the histories of marginalized groups (women, people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ communities, poor and working-class communities, people with disabilities, etc.) sharpens my ability to advise researchers on how and where to search for for specific sources. This anthology contains twelve papers from a diverse set of critical feminist historians describing their methodologies for stitching to together various archival sources to recover women’s histories from around the world addressing “the tired assumption that an archive is simply an immutable, neutral, and ahistorical place where historical records are preserved” (xiii). While this book does not directly engage with digital humanities or the library profession, it provides useful insights regarding feminist methodologies, challenges posed by archival records within the research process, and provides models on how to creatively interpret and recover information to develop scholarship about the lives of everyday women through traces in historical documents. Framing the difficulties in archival records as an opportunity rather than a deficiency, this book would be valuable background reading for those thinking about creating a feminist DH project from a fragmentary archive.

Note: As the dh+lib Review editors work behind the scenes this summer, we have invited a few members of our community to step in as guest editors and share with us what they are reading and why the dh+lib audience might want to read it too. This post is from Anna Kijas, Senior Digital Scholarship Librarian at Boston College.

My current reading list focuses on issues of gender, privilege, and canon building in libraries, archives, and humanities disciplines—in particular, music. As a digital scholarship librarian I am especially interested in how these issues are being explored and addressed in digital humanities by GLAM professionals and scholars. The issue of reifying canon in digital library collections and digital humanities projects, especially those engaged with recovery of texts or music, is one that I have been exploring for a while through my own research and projects, and several of the readings in my list were critical during my preparation for a keynote that I gave at the Music Encoding Conference in May 2018 at the University of Maryland.

In this article, Michelle Caswell reflects on an exercise she developed and used with her students in which they identify examples of embedded white privilege in archives, as well as many ways that they can dismantle this privilege through their professional praxis as future archivists. Caswell argues that faculty (in this case, library and information science faculty) should model behaviors of critique and resistance for their students in order for them to believe that they can disrupt existing oppressive structures. I can see how the actions and outcomes presented by Caswell can also be applied by faculty in disciplines outside of LIS, especially those whose students use archives as part of course projects or dissertation work. Caswell’s call to action—“We get the world we make, we get the classrooms we make, we get the archives we make. Let’s all work to make them more just”—is one that those of us engaged with social justice and critical librarianship have been hearing more loudly and frequently (especially during the past two years!), and it is one that we should all be working towards together.

Amy E. Earhart’s essay is one that I read when it was first published in the Debates in the Digital Humanities volume, but I recently returned to it when I was preparing my keynote draft on gender and canon in digital musicology. In her essay, Earhart examines canon building and digital texts, taking the reader on a deep-historical-dive to the 1990s and early 2000s when digital recovery was at it most active. She identifies a number of projects from this period that fall into one of two scholarly groups. The first group produced small, generally unfunded projects created mostly by individual scholars or collectives, while the second group—primarily consisting of large centers, libraries, and cultural heritage institutions—produced larger-scale projects. Earhart argues that the small-scale projects often focused on non-canonical texts and works by people of color, whereas the large-scale and institutionally-led projects reinforced canonical bias. Earhart notes that large corpora are generally located at major universities or receive grant funding. I’m struck by the similarity between the musicology and literary studies communities: privilege has determined who has entered the canon and who maintains the canon. It is crucial to ensure that our representation does not continue to exclude works by women, people of color, and other marginalized groups.

Safiya Umoja Noble deconstructs the ways in which search engines, social media platforms, and artificial intelligence are driven by algorithms that privilege whiteness and are explicitly racist and sexist against people of color. The entire book is required reading, but chapter 5, with its focus on classification systems, may be specifically of interest to LIS professionals. Noble discusses a well-known 2014 case, where Dartmouth College students who worked with librarians and faculty to ban the use of “illegal aliens” as a subject term in the library catalog. Subsequently, the Library of Congress dropped the term from its subject heading authorities in 2016. She uses this case study to discuss the ways in which people have been classified and represented within the LIS field and how this has led to “continued biased practices in current system designs, especially on the web” (137). Through her research, Noble demonstrates how it is imperative that LIS professionals do not accept classification systems as a given, but rather “examine the beliefs about the neutrality and objectivity of the entire field of LIS and moving toward undoing racist classification and knowledge-management practices” (138). I wish that this text had been available and part of the curriculum when I was an LIS student!

I love Sydney Padua’s graphic novel about Ada Lovelace! My “lighter” reading at the moment, the graphic novel cleverly juxtaposes biographical narrative about Ada Lovelace’s contributions to the first computer (Analytical Engine) with a science fiction story based on Charles Babbage’s writings about an alternate universe. Did you know that Charles Babbage designed an error pop-up (an actual plate would appear with the word “wrong”) for his computer?! Padua’s illustrations and text bring Lovelace’s story to life in a creative medium that makes it accessible to a wider audience who may not be interested in reading full-length biographies or be familiar with Ada Lovelace’s contribution to computing. Issues around invisible labor, librarians and service, as well as feminization of labor are important to me, so I make it a priority to seek out narratives that prominently feature women in all aspects of tech, libraries, and academia. In addition to Lovelace, there are many more prominent women in computing that are only now gaining recognition through the recovery work of scholars, writers, historians, and others.

Attending week two of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute and interested in the role of librarians, technologists, archivists, and other information professionals within the wide world of digital humanities? Join dh+lib for an informal gathering on Thursday, June 14 at 5:30 on the patio of the University Club, 3800 Finnerty Rd, Victoria, BC V8P 5C2.

dh+lib Review Editor Sarah Melton and David Sprunger (Director of Instructional and Learning Technologies, Whitman College) will be there as meetup organizers, but we’re counting on you to bring the conversation, merriment, and community!

Watch this space for other dh+lib conference meetups throughout the coming months!

In this article[2] we propose a body of requirements for making LAM collections findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR), as well as a set of recommendations for assessing existing institutional situations and for implementation of the requirements. These requirements and recommendations are based on the FAIR Principles for scholarly output (FAIR data principles [2014]) and adapted for cultural heritage collections.

The authors close with a roadmap for institutions looking to begin the process of making their collections “FAIR.”

The Semantic Lab at Pratt Institute has unveiled a new Named Entity Recognition (NER) toolchain and demo, in which six NER tools are combined into a single “dockerized” server to “lower the difficulty in leveraging them.”

The UC Santa Barbara Library seeks a collaborative, dynamic, service-oriented librarian to foster excellence in digital scholarship and teaching through the delivery of innovative reference and instructional services to the campus community in the areas of social media, textual, numeric, and demographic data. The successful candidate will support data- and computation-intense researchers in the Interdisciplinary Research Collaboratory (“Collaboratory”), UCSB Library’s new digital scholarship and data support center, and serve as the Library’s expert on the lifecycle of social media data. The expected effective date of the position is July 1, 2018 or later.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Reporting to the Director of the Collaboratory, the Data Services and Digital Scholarship Librarian develops and implements programming that supports data-centric research across the disciplines, including workshops, online learning objects, and course-connected instruction; develops the Library’s research social science data collection; provides consultation services for faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates in all Collaboratory areas, including but not limited to social science, spatial, and social media data; engages in extended project work with faculty researchers; consults on scholarly communication issues, particularly in regards to appropriate use and stewardship of research data; and maintains active Software Carpentry trainer certification (https://software-carpentry.org/).

dh+lib Review posts appear on the dh+lib homepage, in a weekly email newsletter, and are shared in our Twitter feed. Items are selected from the streams of content produced and shared by the dh+lib community. We seek to cast a wide net and include content produced by librarians, archivists, museum workers, faculty, information professionals, technologists, and others.

Our post-publication filtering process relies heavily on the work of our editors-at-large, who volunteer for one-week shifts to survey the stream of content and select what should be highlighted on the dh+lib homepage. Once the editors-at-large have made their nominations, the Review editors make a final selection decision, write a brief snippet providing context for each resource, and then publish the week’s batch each Thursday.

Are you interested in volunteering for the dh+lib Review? It’s an easy way to get involved in the dh+lib community and great to stay current with conversations in DH. Editors-at-large commit to a one-week shift (Thursday to Wednesday) that involves approximately 20 minutes of attention each day.

Looking forward to working with you! Let us know if you have any questions: dhandlib.acrl [at] gmail [dot] com.